Fiction
What Holds Ink To Paper*


*A Note on “What Holds Ink to Paper”
In summer, 2004, I found myself unable to write. I had just finished a novel and I was having a very difficult time getting started with another writing project. I decided that even if I couldn’t write, I could physically act as though I were writing by drawing a pencil across a page. If words emerged during this process, I would write them down. In the course of this exercise, I discovered that more often than not, the act of moving my hand across the page was accompanied by words coming into my consciousness.
What resulted was a collection of Word Drawings, which have allowed me not only to notice the ways in which people respond to text differently when it is accessed primarily as a visual object, but also to explore the spatial relationships between words and the spatial aspects of signification. The drawings can be read both horizontally or vertically and signify in unique ways depending on the reading path selected. This project also continues my ongoing exploration of the sentence as a unit of language, its unique energies, its boundaries, as well as its propensity to disintegrate under certain conditions.
Friends who have seen the drawings have compared them to nets with words tangled in them, ploughed fields, sheet music, and EKGs.
While some of these Word Drawings are unstructured, meaning that the words collected were brought together based on free association, others are structured by focusing on language associated with a particular topic, as is the case with “What Holds Ink To Paper.” Collecting words related to memory and acts of remembering, “What Holds Ink to Paper” refers also to language and concepts derived from my research into gum-arabic. In 2001, it was reported in the New York Times that Osama bin Laden had made an attempt to corner the global market on this material that is an essential ingredient in many consumer products, including soft drinks (particularly diet varieties), pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and one that also has unique applications in newspaper and magazine printing. Gum arabic allows ink to better adhere to paper, while at the same time reducing smearing. During the course of my research, I would also learn that about two thirds of the world’s supply of gum arabic comes from the Darfur region of Sudan, is collected from acacia trees, and harvested primarily by subsistence farmers.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artists Studio
By David RhodesSEPT 2023 | ArtSeen
This is the first presentation in over fifty years dedicated to Rileys works on paper, and it includes over seventy-five works from the artists own collection.

Margaret Atwood’s Old Babes in the Wood: Stories
By Yvonne C. GarrettMARCH 2023 | Books
Margaret Atwoods first fiction since 2019s Booker Prize winning The Testaments and her first story collection since Stone Mattress (2014), these fifteen stories are a master class in how to write, a rollicking good time, and a deep exploration of human relationshipsthe damage we do to each other and the ways we come together.
Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper
By Jessica HolmesJUNE 2023 | ArtSeen
Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper, now on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and organized by the museums Chief Curator Jed Morse, includes thirty sculptures in addition to a wide array of lesser known drawings and paintings. Across these bodies of work, which span from the late 1950s through the present, di Suveros much-lauded vitality and generosity of spirit pervades the show, bestowing the viewer with a lingering sense of joie de vivre that is sometimes hard to come by in an oft-antiseptic contemporary museum setting.
Essays, a Memoir, and a Work of New Fiction
By Yvonne C. GarrettJUL-AUG 2021 | Books
In these three disparate books written by women, there are moments that shock and commonalities that illustrate the importance of diverse voices. In her new collection of essays, Jacqueline Rose writes with her usual precision about violence and its deadly grip on modern life. Black Box is the English translation of Shiori Itos groundbreaking account of surviving sexual violence in Japan. And in While Justice Sleeps, political powerhouse Stacey Abrams brings us a complex thriller focused on a young mixed-race woman investigating corruption at the highest levels of the US government.